Introvert Survival: Basic Protection From Ostracism

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Over the years, I’ve learned most of the social skills I missed out on as a kid, but I’ve grown in my own direction and I can’t ever completely hide that.
Being overtly different from the people you meet puts one in danger of ostracism.
Over time I’ve found a few ways to reduce the likelihood of this outcome.

People are psychologically geared to live in small tribes. Whenever we meet strangers, they are not truly people in our eyes.
Thus, the importance of initial impressions.
This is the time in which you are either grouped into the ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ bin.
Once a person you have met has succeeded in establishing an empathy bond with you, you can begin to gradually relax, but at first, a single misstep can end in ostracism. You have to establish that you’re someone who can be sympathized with.

-Always eat meals with the people you’re living/working with if possible.
Humans instinctually form communal bonds when they eat together.
Eat what they’re eating, even if it tastes horrible, at least for the first few months.
This is the easiest and most effective way not to get ostracized.

-If you are offered some food, a ride, whatever—never refuse, even if you don’t want or need it. Even if the one who offers isn’t your favorite person. To accept is to become a person in their eyes and a member of the community.
Helping others makes people feel good. By extension, they will feel better about you.

When younger, I interpreted what people were saying much more literally. I got in trouble countless times by offending people who were just trying to be nice.

-With members of the opposite sex who are close to your age, never, ever try to ignore them. Both males and females will subconsciously feel rejected, even if there’s no attraction.
Courteous attention and some polite conversation can prevent what could otherwise cause the worst sort of social tensions.
Females especially, are prone to mobilizing all their friends and boyfriends against you if they feel you’ve given them the cold shoulder. And they will nearly always succeed in kicking you out.

This is one of the most common ways I’ve gotten myself ostracized.
Because of the general negative social feedback I got, I didn’t realize until my late teens/early twenties that women found me attractive and were trying to flirt or just trying to feel personally validated by receiving attention from a man they found attractive.

-Keep divergent interests in sci-fi/fantasy, computer games, any unusual hobbies concealed until you’ve known people for a few months. Anything nerdly or out of the ordinary that’s put fragrantly on display right away will cause people to judge you quickly.

-Show familiarity with their favorite brands, TV shows, bands, etc. Go on wikipedia if necessary.
I generally don’t research the group’s belonging tokens online because it’s usually not necessary to achieve the bare minimum of avoiding expulsion. Besides, I don’t want to clutter my mind with that stuff. Worse, one can come across as a douche or a soulless walking encyclopedia if you know the requisite information but clearly aren’t enthusiastic about it.
But wiki-clicking is worth considering if the stakes are particularly high.

-If you see public opinion turning against you, control the damage as best you can and make an exit plan.
Once you’ve overstayed your welcome, things will get ugly.
This one took some years to sink into my head. Socially inept, I would always think that things would just proceed normally, willfully ignoring or missing all the little warning signs that people drop.
I eventually stopped lying to myself and formed an axiom: If you are not seen as part of the group, the group will devise a way to eject you sooner or later. On the instinctual level, you are not a person to them. Beware!

The good news here is you mostly just have to handle the introductory first few months reasonably well. Once people feel that you are an ‘ordinary’ human being they usually won’t begrudge unorthodox habits and interests.
You won’t be everyone’s best buddy, but people will tolerate you and let you live in peace.

Advice vs. Counsel

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Loud people like to give advice.
Advice in my mind is telling other people to do what worked for you regardless of whether they’re anything like you.
There’s inherently something glib, dismissive, narcissistic, and shallow about advice-giving.
This is why people generally don’t like advice—especially from elders—and tend to ignore it.

I distinguish ‘advice’ from ‘counseling’.

A counselor is someone who genuinely tries to step into the shoes of another person and tailor their counsel accordingly.
The difference is that the counselor strives to understand and empathize when recommending a course of action.
People tend to take genuine counsel seriously because it is personal, personalized, and sincere.

To really counsel someone you have to care.

Advice can be flung around at any time, at anyone.
Often it is just a means of trying to socially dominate someone else by representing oneself as the wise one and font of knowledge. One might as well patronizingly pat the advisee on the shoulder as one shows them the way to the light.

Introverts are given a lot of advice and in my experience it is almost never helpful because I have little in common with those who give it.

If one is lost, counselors are the ones to listen to. Few people are willing to stop, talk one-on-one and really try to understand first.

Where giving advice is to profess that one has wisdom.
Even a shred of ability to counsel is a proof of some measure of wisdom.

Is advice worth listening to, then?
It depends.
One needs ask only one question to find out.
“How much is the advice giver like me?”
If the answer is: “not at all.”
Consider doing the opposite.

Introverts and Alcohol

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

I rather enjoy drinking alone.

And yes, I’m quite aware of the implications in our wider society.

Yes, my family has a history of alcoholism.

Yes, I drink most days of the week.

Already, many people might ask me questions about a river in Egypt.

By the standards of my birth culture, I am prime alcoholic material.

Alone, I love to have a beer or some wine with dinner. And then maybe some port, brandy, or sherry for dessert.

Alone on the hottest day of summer there’s nothing like a bottle of rose champagne poured over ice, paired with fresh, chilled nectarines and overripe mangoes.

In the autumn, there’s nothing like crisp hard cider, sweet porters, and bittersweet stouts served with ham, bacon, aged cheddar, and apples.

As the weather turns cold, there’s a special delight to be taken in fiery spirits like a good brandy or whiskey sipped straight while reclining by a fireplace.

I find that alcohol has the ability to carry the intimate imprint of a taste, a smell, a place better than any other substance.

I remember being amazed the first time I had a certain scotch from an island off the coast of northern Scotland. It tasted overwhelmingly of peat smoke and of the sea. It made me imagine myself sitting alone in a small, warm hut on a forbidding northern isle able to hear winds howling outside and waves crashing at the bottom of a rocky cliff…

I’ve watched the way extroverts drink and as far as I can tell, they don’t drink for any of the same reasons I do.

Classic extroverts tend to drink:
In unfamiliar public places with unfamiliar people – to deliberately lower inhibitions. Imbibing in excess gives a socially accepted excuse to misbehave and vent one’s pent up social repression. Alcohol becomes an attempt to escape from responsibility and even from the oppressive prison of oneself.
It doesn’t really matter what they drink so long as it gets them drunk. Generally, the more the taste of the alcohol can be masked(to encourage easy overindulgence) the better. If there’s a killer hangover, no problem. It will make a great story to tell one’s friends.

The Subtle person drinks in safe, comfortable places, in the home, with close friends and family, often alone. Imbibing in excess is unpleasant and unseemly.
The desirable effect is a relaxed, contemplative, spiritual state. To be content to sit and enjoy that wonderful feeling of just being alive, to read a book, or to write.
Not just any drink will do. It must be something that makes both body and soul feel good. While drinking…and afterwards.

This Subtle ethic is one that many mainstream people can’t understand. On the occasion I catch myself speaking of my fondness of good drink, I sometimes see a funny look on other people’s faces.
The main society offers two possibilities in this vein.

a. You’re a drunk.
b. You’re a snob.

How does a Subtle person convey the idea of alcohol as more of a sacred drug as opposed to a mere party drug or a crude tool to signal social status?
The narratives offered by the mainstream birth culture are a barren expanse with little to offer.
Imagine using ‘sacred’ and ‘alcohol’ in the same sentence in actual conversation!

Perhaps better just to drink alone, in the home, with intimates.

Extrovert Critic: “Life’s Not Fair!”

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

“That’s reality!”
“Life’s not fair!”
These same lines were repeated verbatim by different people almost as if orthodox citizens had some script beamed into their head from a collective central computer.

As a teenager, I took these criticisms quite seriously and personally.
Surely I was perhaps deluding myself. Because if I had deluded myself successfully, I by definition wouldn’t be aware of having done so, right?
And the evidence of my failure in life, a dearth of connections and social status was staring me in the face.
There was a pragmatic defeatist in me that told me “They’re right. You have to change yourself or perish.”
But some indignant stubborn streak or passive aggressive laziness, however one wishes to interpret it halted any efforts I might have undertaken to whip myself into shape and embrace their wonderful unjust world.

Now, years later I look back and hardly find my critics inspirational.
I wonder now exactly what they were trying to accomplish with these shame-based criticisms!

We can sort of see it as a Pascal’s gamble.

—

A.
I’ve skillfully deluded myself that I’m not a miserable failure. I must accept their world view, dutifully settle into my ‘place’ at the bottom of the totem pole, and stoically take all the beatings and injustices that life typically rains down on social inferiors while trying desperately to ‘better’ myself at the expense of someone else.
The only relief comes from “putting in the work” to “get my shit together” and “pull myself up by my bootstraps.”
My only hope to succeed lies in renouncing everything I value in myself so that maybe one day I can be a mediocrity living comfortably above the societal basement crammed with outright rejects.

B.
I’m a majority of one and I am in the right to renounce my oppressive, backwards, dying birth culture and create one of my own that values and affirms my natural virtues.
There is certainly plenty of injustice in the world but I will never use this ‘unfairness’ as an excuse for subjecting myself to social debasement and degradation. No amount of compliance or appeasement on my part will beget any appreciation from the unjust. There is no respect for those who have no self-respect.

—

In retrospect I realized:
No possible good outcome could result from accepting my critics’world view! It did not make sense on any level to renounce a hopeful and optimistic world view in favor of a dismal hell of a society with no meaningful purpose or values. A society that had already decided I was an undesirable!

Because I knew I was not an objective observer, I knew I could never be sure if I was deluded or not…
But in a way, the very idea of renouncing myself in favor of my birth society eliminated itself.
How was any life in their world worth living?

Looking back and examining their admonitions now, their presumption and condescension is astounding.
They nobly took it on themselves to offer me a position living in the sewers while they lived on some higher plane and they honestly expected me to take it! Their opinion of me was that low. No wonder some part of me always raged whenever I heard their words of false concern!

The Ritual of Unity

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

The outsider has a special place in the cosmology of the Accepted.

Within any community, there are always tensions, a friction of association that threatens to tear apart the social order.

Of all social rituals among the most important are those that deal with defusing these tensions.

In this respect, an outsider is an important part of the community by not being a part of it. Simply being ‘outside’ implicitly puts others ‘inside.’
The simple existence of an outsider puts the whole social world in perspective.

The shunning and persecution of the outsider, the other is the most powerful of all Rituals of Unity.
To carry out this ritual is to place in that one person all of those amassed woes of society.
And once this living effigy is constructed to symbolically burn it upon the altar of unity.

But it can’t just be any source of otherness, it has to be something sufficiently foreign, hate-able, and threatening. One has to earn it and be worthy of it.

After all, what has become of the United States without a Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia to inspire fear, drive everyone together, and resolve internal disputes for the good of all? The substitute sacrifices that have been offered up since then have been rejected by the Gods.
Without a fitting sacrifice for the Ritual, the society cannot be properly purified of its ills. The people must drift apart and squabble.

If you have often been that one person who just can’t seem to fit in, it behooves you to understand just who you are.
You are a demon, Ahriman, Satan, St. George’s dragon, that snarling little dwarf permanently lodged beneath Shiva’s foot, Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein… the embodiment of everything that tempts people away from their proper social roles and undermines the Correct order.

It is in part for this reason that I identify all Subtle things with shadow, darkness, the night, the moon, the underworld, chaos…

Once you understand your place, just who you are in their universe, there is a certain delicious delight to be taken in it.
And many things in our lives that seemed mysterious stand suddenly explained.

The Hypocrisy of Being ‘Emotional’

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

People who feel at ease in the larger society tend to believe the world’s troubles are caused by all the “bad people” out there. They’ve never really met these bad people, except on television and in the movies, but in any case, it suffices to blame all these other people out there for social ills.

To some extent, it takes someone viewing from outside to see that pretty much all problems are the emergent result of millions of everyday people pursuing their self-interest.

Except we don’t directly tell ourselves: “I’m pursuing my interests today.” when we wake up in the morning. That’s what our emotions help us out with.
They steer us towards survival and reproduction without us having to think about it.

However, few people actually recognize these survival impulses for what they are.

Thus a group will quickly eject someone who doesn’t like the same bands or wear the same clothing. Something will just feel ‘off’ to them and they’ll invent some kind of excuse based on how they ‘feel’ to justify carrying out the will of their collective.

Problem: Someone who doesn’t fit in is a liability to the group:

-Opportunity cost. A human can handle 150 or so social relationships at once. It is not rational to spare a slot when better applicants are available.

-The person in the group who feels the least unity is the one most likely to sell everyone out.

-Or leave for a group that’s a better fit. All the time and energy invested in them has gone to waste.

Solution: Eject them.

But to think like this would be Machiavellian and calculating.

The solution: Don’t think. Just be emotional.

But people who don’t understand themselves as human beings or as human animals(most people) fail to recognize that “just going with emotions” will consistently guide them down exactly this path of Machiavellian self interest.

And so long as most people are unable to reflect on the true nature of their drives and actions, there can be no change in the overall nature of societies.

You can have a revolution, lock up lawbreakers, play with political reforms…

But there’s been thousands of years of this with no significant change in the basic function of your typical pyramidal agricultural society.

There’s something important in this for the lone introvert who’s struggling to survive.

Even if you lack social skills, you can predict what the people around you will do next.

Just figure out what is in their best survival/reproductive interest, then watch them actually do it. Each action will be accompanied by some sort of justification that puts them in the best possible light.

After this elaborate process, not one of them is the wiser about what actually happened or why they did it.

Extroverted Critic: “You Need to Be More eMOtional”

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

“Sometimes you need to let go man and just go with your eMOtions. You think too much.”
What Subtle person hasn’t spent years getting bombarded with this platitude?

The critic is usually well-meaning and just trying to help, but it gets old and comes across as patronizing.

It’s implicit in their advice that they, and outgoing people in general are superior emotional beings who feel more while I’m some sort of semi-automaton.
Why do they feel more? Because they talk about it more of course. And if one’s feelings are not talked about or otherwise put on display, they don’t exist, right? Truly the Loud ethic at work!

I’m appalled sometimes at the insensitivity of social normals. They expect me to explicitly verbally communicate every little thing to them. If they were the EQ geniuses they would have me believe, why are they utterly unable to read some pretty obvious non-verbal cues that indicate my mood, especially while they’re talking down to me? But somehow totally clueless, they keep prattling on.

What they do not realize:
‘Emotion’ means very different things in the sunny surface Loud world than in the Subtle shadow lands.

To your normal person who feels comfortable within the Accepted orthodoxy, emotion refers to the overpowering instinctual survival impulses, though they would not recognize them as such.
In other words:
They worship sheer intensity of feeling whatever that feeling it might be.
Look at the heroes through whom they live vicarious lives in film and fiction!
In their world, bigger is better.

True emotion, however, is more than just capricious passions.

It is distinguished first not by intensity, but by breadth and nuance. A single overwhelming emotion is like a plain lump of white sugar. A complex blend of understated, interrelated emotions that must be puzzled out through introspection, this is a chocolate mousse cake.

To one who is subtle, simply going out for a casual walk and lapsing into a contemplative state as the sun sets and the shadows grow long is a real emotional experience.

The thing we feel when experiencing mortal fear, obsession, or despair, or exultation is just a momentary rush. It puts us outside of our own self and overwhelms the faculties.
Recalled later whether fabulous or traumatic, it’s almost dream-like…never quite real.
We weren’t feeling it, it was feeling us.

Ultimately, the small thing felt intensely is more powerful than the large thing that consumes us. Because in so doing we develop a sense of self and grow closer to it. It makes one less a passive, reactive animal, more aware of what lies within.
Feeling in the Subtle way doesn’t just happen to us. It’s a capacity in oneself that must be nurtured and encouraged to flourish.

In short,
The Subtle emotion must be cultivated within humans, it makes us more powerful
The Loud emotion is common to all animals, it overwhelms us and forces us to submit.

This basic difference I think, is why I feel resentment when I am advised to be less analytical or get in touch with my emotions. If only they would understand! Not only do I feel deeply, but have a different understanding of what it is to feel. I often wonder how I would explain, only to subsequently realize that there’s no way I could do so within normal, acceptable conversation.
And having realized this, it’s almost as if they’ve slapped me in the face, while my hands are tied behind my back!
And there’s no way I can explain this to them either…

The Butt Sniffing Phase

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

When we see unfamiliar dogs meet one another, they’re cautious, suspicious, constantly trying to size each other up and work out a hierarchy. They sniff each other’s butts chasing each other around in circles until some kind of steady order is established.

Very many of us go through an entire lifetime without hardly ever getting past the initial butt sniffing phase.
In our society, politicians, salespeople, advertisers, pick up artists are among those we call social experts. They are experts because they are comfortable dealing with large numbers of other people, especially acquaintances and strangers.
Thus it is quite possible for an expert never to have really understood or moved beyond butt sniffing.

In terms of biological imperatives, and basic needs we are all very much alike. Indeed social experts pride themselves in being able to talk to anyone and sell them anything. The job of a social expert is to simplify people to a lowest common denominator and bypass the uniqueness of the individual. It is easy for these celebrated specialists to forget that our fundamentals are like a set of rules within which we must operate, but that an infinite degree of variation is possible within those rules.

Animals would seem to be even more firmly governed by instincts and general rules than are humans, but we quickly begin to notice that each animal is different.
One of my best friends and former college room mate had two guinea pigs he kept in the room. Part of their charm was the fact that each one had a distinct personality. Though their brains were simple relative to our own and mostly limited to the imperatives of survival, you could increasingly appreciate them as individuals over time. This relationship I started forming with a couple of rodents was very fulfilling because it caused me to reflect: if even these small creatures had plenty of personality, how great then are people?

This realization seemed to me a sharp rebuke to my entire society, a society that tries to reduce human interaction to formulas for getting things we want out of people.
This Loud paradigm is as distant as possible from the formation of rewarding relationships. It actively debases and standardizes people for the sake of short term gains. Is it any wonder so many of us feel jaded about humanity? Is it surprising that a sense of nihilism, cynicism, disgust, distrust, despair, and lack of direction pervades every aspect of our culture?

It is hard not to be frustrated. Who hasn’t gone through facebook or dating site profiles and felt that sick feeling afterwards. Chances are, everyone had the same sort of pictures, the same sort of write ups, liked the same sort of everything, left behind the same superfluous trail of boring hourly updates, like slime in the wake of a snail. As we looked at each new person’s face, our stomach sank as we immediately identified them with an archetype straight out of TV or the movies. We go on to read to read their profile desperately hoping to have our preconceptions proved wrong… in vain.

Truly it is hard for us to believe that any of these people have more personality than an Andean rodent. Has our society truly perverted and stunted us to the point where a guinea pig indeed has more inner life than we do?

No, I think. Those profiles are universally banal and disappointing for a reason. Each one is an image of us that is suitable to the understanding of our society. After all it’s in the public domain and anyone might happen across it. So each profile ends up seeming like a shameless advertisement desperately trying to make a mundane and underwhelming life seem exciting. It ends up being about as exciting as one of our familiar brands at the supermarket changing their packaging a bit and proclaiming: “New improved flavor.”

The underlying problem here is that we must introduce ourselves whether in the company of strangers or making an online profile. There’s only a few things we can say about ourselves that are going to be a universally acceptable opening gambit. Without some specific context or established relationship there’s really not much we can say that is meaningful and without major risks!
At the beginning of a chess game, there are only a handful of possible opening moves. But the complexity and uniqueness of the game multiplies exponentially with each move. The same principle applies when first meeting someone: across a hundred million people we encounter a stultifying sameness.

Our Loud society is so fixated on the beginning phase that we forget the 99.9% of social relationships that lie beyond it.
A cloistered introvert with a few lifelong friends might well know more of humanity than a famous socialite.
Indeed, the province of the Subtle person is the human being.
While that of the Loud person is the human animal.

When we make this distinction we can begin to make some sense of our dilemma.
When we meet a hundred people at a social function, flip through a hundred applications, or read a hundred facebook profiles, we inevitably end up depressed and disappointed.
How did we expect to feel after sniffing a hundred butts?

The Stuck Up Introvert

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Introverts are notorious for seeming hostile, cold, and haughty to the extroverted majority.

This is the result of a simple misunderstanding.
And if extroverts understood just this one thing, they would be well on the way to explaining the introvert who stops them in their tracks and confuses them.

A people person does not understand the perspective of one who has received mainly negative reinforcement from the social environment.
Someone who isn’t socially able to keep up at the beginning tends to fall ever further behind.
A lesser degree of aptitude is compounded by missing out on necessary social learning from an early age.
Thus, bad things happen in social life seemingly without cause.
The whole social world is dangerous, capricious, and unpredictable. The weather changes without warning. Barbarian invasions come out of nowhere. The result is a xenophobic world view.
Most other people out there are foreigners. They value and desire different things. They speak a different language and live in another society.
The goal of social life is to co-exist with a minimum of conflict. Conflicts are a losing game when one is an ethnic minority of one. Social bonds are desirable and necessary, but first survival must be secured. Trust must be built before one can begin to lower their defenses.

Being on the defensive usually gets two responses:
-People ignore you (Desired result, defensive behavior reinforced.)
-People attack you (Fight or flight crisis, defensive behavior reinforced.)

A habitual defensive stance is interpreted:
-As a sign of weakness (an invitation to attack)
-As haughtiness and contempt (attack ensues)

This is social life in a nutshell for a good many introverts.

If you’re an extrovert: Imagine feeling as though it’s you against the world every time there’s any social conflict.
Imagine feeling like you’re about to be stripped naked before the entire world when a stranger pries with questions about your personal life.

If you can do this, you’ve just stepped into the world of that closed person who becomes irritable or confused when you’re just trying to be friendly.

There’s many frightening and confusing events in my own childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood that now make perfect sense to me. The more I’ve learned, the more I realize just how ill equipped I was. Sometimes I think of how I could easily have done things differently, but there’s little reason to dwell on it too long. I couldn’t possibly have known what to do.
I’ve become socially proficient, but some things don’t change. I will always have to be on the defensive. Even when I’m comfortable and acting like a regular guy, I have to be consciously on guard against all sorts of old habits. Worst, unless there’s an extrovert friend there with me who I can talk to afterwards, I’ll never really know if I actually passed the test of belonging. I may have just been oblivious to my mistakes! This lingering uncertainty will always be there.

Kingdom of Introversion Forum

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

KOI Forum

One of my aims is to provide readers some place better than the comments column to be heard.
I might also like to solicit readers for input and ideas.

I would especially like to provide a socializing area for readers. I’ve written a lot about introverts finding one another and working together. I figure it’s time I do something on my site, however small, to help make it possible.

I don’t intend to be excessively discerning.

The main objective here is just having a space to communicate.
I’m not doing this so I can be a nanny moderator shutting down every thread that mentions Hitler, and will be tolerant of most things short of spamming or anything else that threatens to dilute the value of the forum’s content.

Readers, if there’s something you want to bring up, discuss with me outside of the regular comments column, I get an e-mail notice whenever you post/start a thread there.